This paper examines how Brooklyn Heights (2010) and Chicago (2007) depict complex facets of Arab migrant experience in the US, especially in contemporary times. Through narrating a multiplicity of migrant trajectories, both texts pertain to racialized and gendered formulations of identity, cultural belonging and exchange, and national and transnational social and political activism. On the one hand, Brooklyn Heights underscores the interactions of its main character, Hind, a displaced single mother and a Bedouin from Egypt, with similarly struggling Arab and non-Arab immigrants in New York City. Hind’s constant roaming of the streets of NYC to connect with other immigrants may seem neither eventful nor consequential; however, I argue that it constitutes a catalyst for community building and exhibits the migrant community’s unyielding ethos toward survival. Her narration paints a vivid and dynamic picture of the immigrants’ inner world of contradictions ensuing from the gap between their former and new lives, their hopes for self-fulfillment and despair, and their memory and forgetting. Chicago, on the other hand, delves into a circle of Egyptian and American intellectuals and researchers at the University of Illinois, and takes a grandiose approach to disclosing the long standing differences and disjunctions between East and West, tradition and modernity, and national and transnational belonging. I argue that Chicago undertakes literary strategies that reflect its characters’ impulses to change and revolution in opposition to existing hegemonic and authoritarian systems; yet, its configurations of the spirit of change are premised on and restricted to traditional, masculine, and intellectual identities. The paper aims to read what I call “the social activism” in Brooklyn Heights in relation to “the political activism” in Chicago. It also compares the two novelistic stances toward contemporary Arab poetics, as represented in their main characters’ poetic attitudes: i.e. Hind’s aspirations in creative writing (in Heights) and Naji’s poeticism in relation to his scientific pursuits (in Chicago).